THE REBEL : Student Power in Northern Ireland

The Marching season is always a time of
heightened sectarian tension in Northern Ireland, and this
year hardline Loyalist groups opposed to the Peace Process
are mobilising to destroy it on July the 12th. The way that
events are portrayed in the corporate media lead many people
to think of this as an essentially religous conflict, with
Catholics and Protestants locked into an endless form of
tribal warfare over differences in faith and dogma.
Unfortunately, the truth of how this conflict began is never
fully explained, as it shows the power of students and
ordinary people in taking on a racist state. The Rebel
fires back!

Ireland is Britain's oldest colony, and has
struggled for over 800 years

for its independence. In
1922, following the Easter Rising and the War of
Independence, the British Empire conceded partial
independence to the

south of the country, but maintained
rule over the northern six counties

around Belfast. An
artificial state was carefully drawn up to maintain a
majority of Protestant voters, descendants of 17th century
settlers who arrived with the Plantation of Ulster. The
catholic population of the new Northern Ireland were
regarded as disloyal and potential enemies

of the State,
and a system of apartheid based on birth religion was
enshrined. Catholics suffered appauling poverty,
overcrowding in ghettoes, discrimination in employment and
routine harrasement from security forces that recruited
overwhelmingly from Protestant areas. For nearly 50 years,
the six counties of Ulster were Britain's hidden South
Africa, where voting for local elections was determined by
what property you owned. A rented house containing 25
people on the Bogside of Derry had not one vote, whereas its
Protestant landlord who owned many more had 30. Rigged
boundaries for local elections ensured built in majorities
for the Unionists- the predominantly catholic Derry had
three representatives for the 40,000 strong Bogside, and
nine for the 20,000 protestants on the Waterside. This
system of political corruption was known as
Gerrymandering.

The UK Education Act of 1948 gave people
the right to free tertiary education, and by the 1960s, a
wave of highly articulate, working class catholic students
emerged from Northern Ireland's campuses, such as Derry's
Eamonn Mc Cann, Belfast's Michael Farrell, and the miniskirt
wearing , cigarette smokin', streetfighting MP, Bernadette
Devlin. Taking their inspiration from Martin Luther King and
the images of the black civil rights struggle in the US on
television, they formed a radical student group, People's
Democracy. PD began demanding "British rights for British
citizens", such as one person one vote, an end to
discrimination in employment and housing, and unity between
the Protestant and Catholic poor against sectarianism.
Their marches were banned by the state, and on the 5th
October 1968, images of their march in Derry being violently
batoned to the ground by out of control police shattered the
silence and exposed Northern Ireland's injustice before the
world. The Civil Rights movement was born, tens of
thousands joining the student cause and marching for
equality in defiance of the state.

Employment, housing and
politics was controlled by the Orange Order and its
political wing, the Unionist Party. The Orange Order is an
exclusively protestant organisation, which forbids members
to marry catholics, and encourages the protestant working
class to look to their upper class betters for leadership.
The Orange Order organises triumphalist marches through
catholic areas, to celebrate their colonial

victory over
them in 1690. Many of the police in the Royal Ulster
Constabulary (RUC) are members of the Order, and gave the
Loyalist mobs a free reign when the marches turned to
pogroms. By 1969, the people of

Derry could take it no
more. Its political equivalent was a Ku Klux Klan march
through a black area, or a Nazi parade through a Jewish one.
One of their most popular songs is "we're up to our necks in
Fenian Blood"....

For three days and nights, the town of
Derry rose in popular revolt. They were not prepared to
allow the Orange Order march into the Catholic

bogside and
start another pogrom. Radical student leaders like the
newly elected MP Bernadette Devlin and the revolutionary
socialist Eamonn Mc Cann helped organise the resistance
against the mob and the sectarian RUC. By the end of the
Battle of the Bogside, the RUC were defeated, and "Free
Derry" was established behind the barricades. The student
radicals talked of revolution, of catholic and protestant
unity. Class not creed was the real divide in NI, and the
Orange state was hovering near collapse.

The British Army
was brought onto the streets on 13 August 1969, supposedly
as a "peace keeping force" to protect Catholics from further
pogroms. Over ten thousand families had been burned out of
their houses

in Belfast during the Battle of the Bogside,
and initially they were welcomed by the exhausted people.
But very soon, their true purpose was

exposed as soldiers
began to attack civil rights marches- they were there to
prop up the dying Orange regime, and reinforce the RUC. The
true nature of Britain's dirty little war is being exposed
currently at the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, where in 1972 the
Parachute regiment murdered

14 innocent Civil Rights
marchers. Bloody Sunday was a callous act, deliberately
planned to shoot the mass movement off the streets.
Afterwards, the till then irrelevant IRA began recruiting in
droves, and

a 30 year military campaign raged, taking 3600
lives.

My mom often tells me I was arrested before I was
even born! She was on

a Civil Rights March from Dundalk
to Newry when she was preagnant with the Rebel in her belly!
A British helicopter hovered over the 12,000 strong march
and informed us all, 1984 style, that we were on an
illegal

procession and we were all under arrest! The
Civil Rights movement has been written out of official
British history, yet for many people it explains the origins
of the conflict and its possible solution. The students of
PD wanted to unite Catholics and Protestants, they
mobilised

hundreds of thousands onto the streets and
challenged a rotten state. The bigots in Northern Ireland
are still there, trying to drive us back into another
horrific dead end of sectarian warfare.

The Orange marches
are a worrying time for Irish people everywhere, and this
year, english neo nazis have joined their ranks at Drumcree.
People fear another bombing or machine gunning of a bar will
be organised by these fascists to entice the IRA out of
their ceasefire and

back into war. We can only see in the
days ahead what will happen, but the bigoted and racist
nature of the Orange Order is now on show around the
world.

For the Rebel's Links to information on Northern
Ireland, go to
http://sites.netscape.net/josephtrotsky/northern

Recommended
reading: War and Peace in Northern Ireland, by Eamonn Mc
Cann. The Price of My Soul, by Bernadette Devlin. Northern
Ireland: The Orange State, by Michael Farrell.

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